Elon Musk Gets Testy with Don Lemon: ‘I Don’t Have to Answer Questions from Reporters’

BURNETT: “So, when you said that — I want to play some of the clips, because some of them are illuminating. These are clips that you shared with us. This is a part of the conversation with Musk where you ask him about hate speech. Here it is.”

[Clip starts]
LEMON: “Hate speech on the platform is up. Do you believe that X and you have some responsibility to moderate hate speech on the platform, that you wouldn‘t have to answer these questions from reporters about the great replacement theory as it relates — “
Musk: “I don‘t have to answer these question — “
LEMON: “The great replacement theory as it relates to Jewish people, do you think that — “
Musk: “I don‘t have to answer questions from reporters. Don, the only reason I‘m doing this interview is because you‘re on the X platform and you asked for it. Otherwise, I would not do this interview.”
LEMON: “So you don‘t think — do you think that you wouldn‘t get in trouble or you wouldn‘t be criticized for these things?”
Musk: “I get criticized constantly. I could care less.”
[Clip ends]

BURNETT: “Illuminating in so many ways, but I have two — I‘ve two things I want to ask you about that, Don. First, the great replacement theory, as you bring it up, you know, he has tweeted a tweet he shared, ‘Increasing illegals boosts Dem voting power, causing them to recruit more. If Dems win president, House and Senate, they‘ll grant citizenship to all legals and America will become a permanent one-party deep socialist state.’ Right, he has gone there directly. How much does he stand by these ideas?”
LEMON: “Well, he didn‘t quite seem to understand that he did — originally, he did that with Jewish people, the sort of a great replacement theory thing that he did with Jewish people, and he got in trouble and he had to go to Auschwitz and answer questions and apologize and go with Ben Shapiro. But he doesn‘t understand that that sort of rhetoric that he talks about, the great replacement theory and a migrant invasion, that‘s what radicalized shooters’ views in their manifestos, those exact words. The people who go and shoot up people, whether they be Latino people who live in Texas, or black people who are in a supermarket in Buffalo, or Jewish people who are —who are worshiping, those people use the same rhetoric, that they are tropes, that they‘re either racist for Latinos or black people or for Jewish people. And I wanted to know if he felt any responsibility, as someone who has the one of the largest social media information platforms in the world — “
BURNETT: “Quarter billion people.”
LEMON: “A quarter billion people, I think it‘s 455 or 500 million users a week, and it doesn‘t seem that he feels that he has any responsibility with that, because he seemed really averse to facts, that facts did not matter to him. It didn‘t matter that he retweeted things that were offensive to people. And this whole — the whole idea of what I was asking about, was it offensive ad did he feel that his platform should have better moderation? Because the things that I asked him about were not supposed to be on his platform according to his own rules, his own content rules. They were supposed to be removed from the platform. He says, ‘Well, we don‘t amplify them.’ But it doesn‘t matter. They‘re there, they’re in the public forum and people can find them, photographs or tweets of Jewish people depicting them with big noses and as caricatures, of African-Americans in the — “
BURNETT: “The bait clips and — “
LEMON: “Yes.”